Spring ’18

Spring ‘18 is coming to a sandbox near you and that means the release notes are out! The PDF is 439 pages this time around, and it felt like Salesforce was adding a bunch of lesser used features and minor enhancements to bring Lightning up to feature parity with Classic. That being said, there are still many exciting new additions and here are my top 10 favorites!

List Class adding contains() and indexOf() methods

For too long, I’ve been putting all my list items into a set for the sole purpose of running a .contains() on it. Excited to see this option is coming to List as well!

Custom Themes and Branding

Was very excited to see this discussed at Dreamforce. Every company has a unique usage for Salesforce and it is great to see that Salesforce is allowing the uniqueness to expand to the color scheme of the org itself.

Related Fields and Other Objects in Component Visibility

At Dreamforce, I found out about the capability of dynamic Lightning component visibility. Very encouraged to see that this has been extended to related fields and objects as well! This allows for additional flexibility on Lightning pages.

Force.com is now the Lightning Platform

This is more of a semantic thing than anything and while maybe not one of my favorite changes, I’m hoping that this helps introduce some consistency in Salesforce’s naming conventions. I’ve only been working with the platform for a couple years but in that time, I’ve heard the platform referred to as the Force.com Platform, the Salesforce1 Platform, the Salesforce Platform, and probably another name or two that I’m forgetting. Hopefully this name sticks!